Posts

1. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed

Only one book has ever grabbed my attention on the first line. That book, of course, being The Gunslinger. The line, unsurprisingly, is the one above. I read the whole series, and I can understand why people have mixed feelings. It’s a weird series, other King stories get mixed up in the weird world presented. But I remember it fondly.¹

0. Forward

The bulk of this post was written during the peak of the cultural exchange. So if you’re about to say “ok, but it’s not that way now” then just hold your horses, we’ll talk about that at the end.

1. The Event

I opened Twitter to look to see what a couple of my Twitter friends were up to and see if there was anything interesting to comment on. I do that periodically, I’ve talked about it before. A lot. Usually Twitter is kinda trash. Someone’s arguing with someone else about something, some stupid asshole is trying to tell us there will be no jobs in 6 months for the third or fourth year in a row. That sort of thing.

1. Programmer Art

I’m a back-end developer. If you have come to a stream you will either already know this, or be surprised by this. If the latter you probably just think I’m a really bad developer. I have spent most of my time making things that take command line arguments or stdin inputs. Some of the things I have worked on have a web UI, but it was someone else’s job to build it, I just give them a nice REST API to call.

1. Struggles

I’ve been putting off writing this blog. For one, I wasn’t sure what I want to say this month. The world outside feels like it has been more of the same crap. More insane stuff happening. More terrible job market. More layoffs in the news. I think part of the problem is that I’m on social media again, and even though I try to curate a lot of that crap out it still creeps in. Because everyone is talking about it all.

1. Wowsers, a year!

January marks the one-year anniversary of me streaming. I didn’t actually record the first date I streamed anywhere, but as far as I can tell based on other data points it was sometime in the first few weeks of January. So I’m going to just go with January as the origin of the stream.

This is actually completely by coincidence, because I don’t believe in new years resolutions. I believe in starting that thing you want to do right now, whatever it is. There’s no time like the present to make meaningful progress toward that thing. It just so happened that I got all the pieces together and assembled the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to make a halfway informed attempt at running a stream around that time.

1. Wowsers, a year!

I started setting things up for the channel in December of last year. I didn’t actually start streaming until mid-January but December is where the idea started to become reality. So let’s talk about the state of Studios.

This might be a little confusing to people that aren’t me, so let me clarify real quick.

Mongoose Studios is a vehicle for my ideas/ventures/brand. Streaming is one thing that Mongoose Studios does. Software development is another thing that I do, even if a lot of it is on stream. If I were to branch out into anything else I would try to bring it under the Mongoose Studios brand in some way that made sense.

1. I want to do things, but I run out of motivation

It’s time to tackle this head-on. I’ve mentioned some of this before, I’ve talked about it on stream, I’ve told people individually. Now it’s time to write it down.

Imagine that it’s Monday. It’s been a long day, you worked, ran errands, whatever. Now you could sit down and work on whatever thing you want to do or learn, but you’re tired. Yesterday you did it, and it was a great time. But yesterday you had the magic sauce. Yesterday, for some reason, you had motivation. Tonight, you don’t have that. It’s probably ok if you just play some video games, drink a beer or two, watch TV, take the night off. You can work on that thing again when you feel like it.

0. Housekeeping

Before we begin I just wanted to drop a little note here to let you all know that I’m going to be switching to a once monthly blog post schedule. Taking a little extra time on this one and letting myself not only breathe but polish my thoughts a little bit more has made me realize I was pushing way too hard and spending too much time trying to catch up on writing/editing these.

A lot has happened in the past couple of days, and it didn’t feel right to post what I had prepared as a result.

I am not a political person. I do not choose to engage in politics.

I can find agreement and strong disagreement with various positions and core ideals of “both sides.”

I say this because I want you to understand where I am coming from, or more specifically where I am not coming from.

1. Culture

Businesses make a huge deal about their culture. They want you to read their culture page (spoiler, it looks the same as every other one) and they list “great culture” as a benefit on their careers page.

It’s all a lie. Because culture is NOT what you say it is. Culture is what you do every single day. No amount of platitudes will change that. In fact some of the places I have worked that had the WORST culture were the most vocal about the imaginary one.